THE LIVES THEY LIVED: Andre Weil; Numbers Man

By Paul Hoffman

Published: January 3, 1999

The Parisian emigre Andre Weil, perhaps the last of the great mathematical generalists, did not suffer fools lightly, and university bureaucrats headed his list of fools. Once, when asked to submit a budget for the math department, Weil responded, ''Give us enough chalk.'' Mathematicians generally aren't fussy about where they work: important mathematical conjectures have been proved in the bathtub and on the trampoline. Weil (pronounced VAY) knew this firsthand: In 1939, at the age of 33, he solved an important number-theory problem while serving time in a French military prison for evading the draft.

The son of a physician, Weil and his younger sister -- the famous mystic and social activist Simone Weil -- grew up in an intellectual household. Summer vacations were spent mastering languages. The two children chatted in Greek and, Weil recalled, tried ''to outdo each other in declaiming grand speeches from Corneille or, better yet, Racine.'' When he was 8, Weil played checkers with wounded French soldiers after World War I began, and also became ''passionately addicted'' to math. ''Once when I took a painful fall,'' he recalled, ''my sister Simone could think of nothing for it but to run and fetch my algebra book, to comfort me.''

In 1928, with a Ph.D. from the University of Paris under his belt, Weil channeled his addiction into a drive to restore glory to French mathematics. He was disturbed that math had grown increasingly specialized. His grand goal was to unify the field, to demonstrate how many of the seemingly unrelated byways of mathematics were related. This unification effort, which required rebuilding much of modern mathematics from first principles, was too daunting to accomplish alone. So in 1934, Weil and a few other like-minded French numerati formed an informal society to pursue this goal.

Few mathematical geniuses are household names, and Weil, who died last August in Princeton, N.J., at age 92, was no exception. But for all of Weil's general obscurity, he was often called the world's greatest living mathematician, no small distinction in the age of Albert Einstein, John Von Neumann and Kurt Godel. He was a pure mathematician, not interested in problems that had applications in science or business. He loved numbers and shapes because of their abstract beauty. His most important contributions to mathematics stemmed from the unification efforts that began in 1934. Weil succeeded in bringing algebra and geometry further together, providing the foundation of modern algebraic geometry.

Weil was also one of the few mathematical giants to write an autobiography, ''The Apprenticeship of a Mathematician.'' The book is relatively silent about his mathematical ideas but long on lively anecdote. Weil seems to have known everybody. He sipped tea with Gandhi and put Trotsky up for a night. Claude Levi-Strauss once asked him to solve ''a problem of combinatorics concerning marriage rules in a tribe of Australian aborigines.

Polymath though Weil was, math was his greatest joy. Nothing, he said, was more exhilarating than experiencing the connections between mathematical ideas flowing through his mind. ''Unlike sexual pleasure,'' Weil wrote, ''this feeling may last for hours at a time, even for days.''

Photo (HERMANN LANDSHOFF/ARCHIVES FOR THE INSTITUTE OF ADVANCED STUDY)

Paul Hoffman is the author of ''The Man Who Loved Only Numbers: The Story of Paul Erdos and the Search for Mathematical Truth.''